Should We View Tatlin as a Russian Constructivist or a Ukrainian?

It may be a lazy critic cliché to write that an artist’s life was itself a work of art, but we are dealing with a man who let a wounded stork convalesce in his bed while he slept on the floor. As a teen-ager, he became a sailor and voyaged from the south of Russia to India and Egypt. Later, he made extra rubles boxing at the circus. He talked his way into Picasso’s studio by pretending to be a blind musician. Picasso kicked him out, but the same trick fooled Kaiser Wilhelm II into giving him a gold watch, which he promptly sold. His motto was “Life into art,” but only a fraction of each—just enough to fill a K.G.B. file—forms our view of Tatlin.

We can imagine how that file read, how the life was snipped, pressed, and dried: Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin. Born 1885, a subject of the old Russian Empire. Grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Self-described artist-engineer. Enrolled in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 1902. Proud supporter of the Revolution. Enemy of dainty bourgeois painting. Archrival of the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich. Father of Constructivism, a term that Malevich sneeringly invented and Tatlin cheekily accepted. Proponent of “real material in real space.” Sculptor of whizzing shards of metal, wire, wood, and glass. Saw no inherent contradiction between beauty and use. Spent the early years of the Soviet Union in Moscow and Petrograd, where he favored his comrades with utilitarian designs for clothes, textiles, and a super-efficient stove. Famous for his “Monument to the Third International,” an enormous skeletal wedding cake that was never built but survives thanks to models and photographs. Star of the avant-garde while the U.S.S.R. still permitted one. Later shunned for the crime of not being a painter of socialist realism. Died 1953, Moscow.

The word “decolonization” comes up more than once at “Tatlin: Kyiv,” the Ukrainian Museum’s delightfully weird survey of the artist’s work from the nineteen-twenties. The theme, here in the heart of Manhattan’s Little Ukraine, may be Ukrainian-ness itself: our hero is Volodymyr, not Vladimir, and, if he sometimes comes off as a cheerleader for the Soviet Union, he is also a proud son of Kharkiv, raised on folk art and bandura music. Revolution took him east, but, some years later, the new rector of the Kyiv Art Institute extended an invitation, and from 1925 to 1927 Tatlin taught there, along with other Ukrainians whose good fortune briefly convinced them that Communism had brought about the best of all possible creative worlds. In the following decade, the institute resumed teaching academic painting, and the luckiest of the old bunch switched to churning out propaganda. The rest were shot, imprisoned, or otherwise dissolved in the gut of Stalin’s new empire. This is all horribly timely, though the present-day parallels never feel forced: Tatlin is Russian, Russian, Russian in most Western accounts, but between Tatlin and Malevich, El Lissitzky and Anatol Petrytsky, and the Alexanders Archipenko and Dovzhenko, there was barely a Russian avant-garde without artists of Ukrainian heritage. This show, which is being billed as the first Tatlin survey in the United States, confirms that some things are so overdue they become punctual again.

There are an impressive number of original Tatlins on display here: seven. That’s more than there were in MoMA’s big Russian avant-garde show in 2016, a lack on the level of a book about the Civil War that barely mentions Lincoln. It’s understandable, though: the Ukrainian Museum’s director, Peter Doroshenko, told me that something like ninety-five per cent of Tatlin’s work was either lost or destroyed by a totalitarian state that saw no need for it. Most of what has lasted won’t be leaving Russia’s museums anytime soon, but Ukraine sent what it could, apparently with the support of the First Lady, Olena Zelenska. At the outset, you find two of Tatlin’s small Cubist drawings, both female nudes. Minor works, maybe, but notice how, when Tatlin “does” Picasso, he has none of his early idol’s punitiveness. The hard wedges of the women’s bodies do no harm and pose no threat—they jolt us awake, and that’s all.

Tatlin scholarship is whispery on his time in Kyiv, for the excellent reason that Stalin’s minions torched most evidence of it. Even with all the research the Ukrainian Museum’s team has done, we don’t know the names of more than a third of Tatlin’s students, probably because most died in the purges. (The rector survived the Gulags, and went on to write about Ukrainian art, but censors forbade him to include anything about Tatlin.) The information about the institute which has avoided the memory hole just sits there, though this makes some of it glow brighter. The first showstopper is a vitrine’s worth of graphic designs that Tatlin created in Kyiv, which are making their museum début. Like his sculptures, his posters are all limb, no body. One, which he created for the silent film “Boryslav Laughs,” based on a Ukrainian novel about labor strikes, takes an oil-extraction plant and shuffles its parts like playing cards, until there’s no center or dominant direction: pipes snake around and between and under more pipes, while the letters of the title stomp on everything. Amid the mayhem, Tatlin’s precision impresses; you may not be sure where the various bits go or what they do, but you can always tell whether they’re rope or wood or metal or brick. Or flesh—notice the tiny worker huffing up the steps in the top right. Either he is praying for a worker’s uprising or this is what life looks like in the new socialist utopia.

It is easy to interpret art like this in the scornful clarity of hindsight. Everything starts to feel like an omen of totalitarianism: the lopsided, unrealized model of “Monument to the Third International,” absent from the Ukrainian Museum but present in countless books, is almost too obviously a modern-day Tower of Babel. To appreciate Tatlin on his own terms, here is a good rule of thumb: lopsidedness is next to godliness. Right angles are for wimps. Material flourishes when it seems on the verge of collapsing. Tatlin was far from the only Soviet avant-gardist to make vigorous compositions with the diagonal (see almost any Malevich), but, judging from his students’ work, of which there is a good sampling in this exhibition, he may have gone farthest in making an outright aesthetic principle of it. A 1931 film poster designed by Semen Mendel is a riot of loops and arrows—the only level object is a grayish industrial worker, and he looks unstable, balanced on nothing at all. Everything tilts because everything moves because everything shakes with energy. The film is called “Rolling of Iron,” which could almost be the name of Tatlin’s tower.

A marine carpenter once saw a photograph of the original “Monument” model and declared that it must have been created by someone in the same line of work, with a knack for staircases. Bull’s-eye: Tatlin was a carpenter during his sailor days, and it’s likely that he carried on thinking of himself as a maker of objects that were ingenious and elegant but above all useful. The anecdote convinces me that the key Tatlin work in this show is a podium, built in 1927, for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and reconstructed from old photographs. In a way, it is a staircase, too, with three little steps in the back, followed by three big ones that would curl around a speaker like a pile of books about to topple. Unusual—but what is a usual podium? A big, immobile slab that makes the occupant look impressive while ordering the rest of us to pay attention? Tatlin’s version isn’t more honest, exactly, but it offers a sweeter dream of authority: this podium’s speaker addresses us from the stairs, a little like that huffing worker, and enlists us in the climb.

If his life was a work of art, which genre? Tragedy is the obvious answer, but a strong case can be made for black comedy. Such horrific ironies! The man who thought realism dead was buried by it, the artist-engineer who celebrated tangible material is mainly remembered in photographs. Above all: the ship’s carpenter who aspired to help his fellow Homo sapiens devoted himself to folly after folly. (It’s unlikely that the Soviet Union could have built his tower even if it had wanted to.) He spent years at work on a flying machine called the Letatlin. And then, to top a nasty joke with a nastier one, he was deemed useless for the final twenty years of his life. Museums blackballed him for refusing to make Soviet kitsch, and by the end he was sketching portraits for money in the streets of Moscow. Eight people at most attended his funeral. What kind of art he was making for himself we don’t really know, because after he died a cleaner threw away most of what remained in his home, having deemed it useless.

She may have been right, too, but there is a difference between useless and worthless. A drawing in the exhibition, by Tatlin’s student Mykola Triaskin, shows some young men slouching by the water. Most of them are fishing, but one lies back, smoking. I suppose this would qualify as useless behavior in Soviet terms, but there’s no hint of parasitism; we may be looking at a kind of miniature utopian society. (Is it purely a coincidence that the tilted net in the drawing’s center looks like Tatlin’s “Monument”?)There is enough for everybody here. Work is a form of play, and leisure is the natural state of things: life for life’s sake.

And art for art’s sake? Someone else whose very existence was a masterpiece declared all art quite useless. Tatlin would have hated the idea, of course, but learning how the Soviet Union swallowed him whole makes me want to say that we could all do with some extra uselessness, in our aesthetics as well as in our lives. Speaking of which, the final showstopper in “Tatlin: Kyiv” is a wingless reconstruction of the Letatlin. It’s bulky but delicate, like a bug’s exoskeleton, with enough room for an adult to fit inside, and endless graceful lines that swoop off into other graceful lines. For most of the time I spent looking, I forgot that it was ever supposed to fly. ♦